Data Types

Python is a strongly typed language, in the sense that at runtime it prevents typing errors and it engages in little implicit type conversion or casting, i.e. converting one type to another without a specific call to a conversion function.

codecademy = 575
codecademy = "575 broadway"

After line 1, codecademy is an int. After line 2, codecademy is a str.

Python includes the following categories of built-in data types:

• String type: str
• Boolean type: bool
• Binary types: bytes, bytearray, memoryview
• Number types: int, float, complex
• Sequence Types: list, range, tuple
• Set types: set, frozenset
• Dictionary type: dict

type()

The type() function can be used to retrieve the data type of an object:

message = "Hello, world!"

print(type(message))
# Output: <class 'str'>

isinstance()

The isinstance() function can be used to test if an object is an instance of a specified type. This will print a boolean value for each function call, indicating if the object is an instance of the given type:

word = "purple"
languages = ("Python", "JavaScript", "Go")

print(isinstance(word, str)) # Output: True
print(isinstance(languages, list)) # Output: False
print(isinstance(languages, tuple)) # Output: True